This week, plans were upturned when we got the news that my father-in-law had entered into home hospice care. His cancer treatments have been unsuccessful in stemming the growth of the disease and he is preparing for the end of his life, which we're told could come in weeks or even less time.
We leave for California on Monday to spend the remaining time with family.
As you can imagine, this is a stressful time as we rush to make travel arrangements, figure out pet care, and cancel holiday plans.
And when things get intense and our nerves get frazzled, as has happened repeatedly in the last few days, Sweetie advises me to go into the other room and drum.
Yes, really.
Drumming is something I've often done throughout my life to relieve stress. Today has been especially difficult as we juggle various details of our need to rush to be with family. So more than once, I've retreated to the back room in our little house and chopped out.
In the morning it's been as simple as playing slow and steady eighth notes to a metronome, gradually increasing speed and continuing until my hands get tense, then backing off of that a little and hanging out at the fastest comfortable tempo for several minutes. This is usually enough to calm me down and clear my head.
If after that I feel a desire to chop out on random stuff I can do that too, like in the videos below.
This "drummitation," as I like to call it, has helped repeatedly in my quest for calm during tense times. I recommend it highly.
Numerous studies have shown that repeated drumming can calm the fight-or-flight response in the brain, can improve blood flow and lower blood pressure, and can help to relieve stress in much the same way that gentle exercise does. I must have known all that instinctively before I'd ever read about it, when I was a kid; my childhood was filled with a great deal of stress and drumming was something I could always do to calm down. About eighteen months ago I began to turn it into a morning meditative practice, with a metronome and a rubber pad (to avoid disturbing Sweetie, who worked in the dining room and asked me not to meditate on an actual drum while she was home). It has become a regular part of my meditative practice and a cherished part of how I wake up and come to "full density" in the morning.
Wherever your drumming takes you this season, I hope it's enjoyable and fulfilling. Happy Holidays.
A tip o' the hat to Kevin Lehman for setting up the Wilcoxon Rudimental Challenge on Facebook.
Rudimental drummers from around the world are posting videos of themselves playing one of the solos from the seminal collection "All-American Drummer: 150 Rudimental Solos" by Charley Wilcoxon.
This book is filled with intermediate to advanced rudimental solos that assume a knowledge of at least the first thirteen traditional drum rudiments (based on the 26 original rudiments as designated by the founders of NARD back in the 1930s -- NOT the 40 rudiments designated much later by Percussive Arts Society).
I wasn't challenged to join the group by another drummer, so I worked up a solo of my choice, joined the group and tossed my hat in the ring. It took several days to work up the solo to a reasonable temp, and another hour to play it through several times with the repeat without screwing up, before I felt ready to make a video of myself. Then it took another ten takes or so to get a clean take from start to finish. Even then, it was hairy going, and I could've done the end of the repeat better; but it was fun to challenge myself like this.
I'll totally do it again very soon.
(Here's my attempt for posterity, played in the new drum which still needs some gradual fine-tuning and tightening over the next week or so. NOTE: I chose to play the rolls timed and wide open, rather than to rush the drags and risk blowing the timing and tempo. It's an individual choice, and up to each drummer what to do with the rolls.)
Enjoy! And if you think you'd like to give this a try, contact Kevin Lehman at the Facebook group to learn more. The group has grown rapidly so that there are now a few repeats of solos but that's probably not a huge deal if most of the solos in the book are spoken for. Check with Kevin.
If you don't own this book, it's available at multiple book stores, including Powell's Books in Portland, and also from Reverb online.
Here's Solo No. 1 if you're so inclined to dive into the collection. I think it's worth owning a copy of the whole collection. Happy drumming!
During this week, my partner and I are both serving congregations as cantorial soloists.
But we're serving different communities and have to practice different music and/or settings.
In our very small house, that sometimes means we take turns practicing and the other goes somewhere else for an hour ot two to give each other some space and time alone in the house.
It was my turn the other day, so I took sticks and a pad over to the park and chopped out a little.
Since hanging out on the Marching Percussion Group on Facebook, I've learned quite a lot and have gotten exercises, advice and encouragement from some very experienced drummers, including a few rockstars who marched in drum corps in the 1960s and early 70s. Since my drumming in town is limited to to the community band I play with now and then, where the musical challenges are more ensemble based than rudimentally based, My rudimental chops are developing slowly after my eight-year hiatus in the late 90s-early 2000s; and I am slowly making up for some of the lost time.
My flams STILL suck, mostly because of my arthritic left hand; and I can play more easily only after soaking my hands in hot water in the mornings before I play. But my rolls and diddle exercises are smoother now, and I enjoy playing more than I did when I started back up again.
If time and logistics permitted, I would love to find a rudimentally-based drumline to chop out with, even if just for fun once a month.
I originally wrote this as a term paper for a course in Ottoman History that I'd been invited to take by Dr. Jon Mandaville, my Middle East Studies Certificate advisor and a great guy. Since it was a graduate course, he allowed me to take it as a 499 and assigned a term paper that was, at 25 pages typed, half the length of what his grad students in history were required to turn in.
I had never written so thorough or long a paper in my life, with footnotes and everything.
When I turned it in, I also had to give the class an oral presentation that summarized my research. That part was fun, because I basically wheeled a large cart from the band room, piled high with percussion instruments, into the History department and gave a talk with demonstrations for the class, who were all grad students. It was a difficult and ultimately fun assignment.
During my research, the editor of Percussive Notes, the quarterly journal of the Percussive Arts Society, responded to my request for assistance (he said he couldn't really offer any as the topic was not in his wheelhouse) and invited me to submit my paper when it was finished. I promised him I would, but only if I got an A on the paper.
I got an A-minus. The editor urged me to send it.
So I sent him the paper. Since I could not afford membership in the PAS at the time (and since I was only a term away from graduating and wouldn't need a PAS membership in Cantorial school), I asked if he would send me two copies of the issue when it came out. One would be for my advisor, and the other for my father.
About two months before graduation, I got my copies in the mail, and brought one to my advisor as my way of thanking him for challenging me.
He hadn't known that I was submitting my paper anywhere. He was thrilled.
He cut the article out of the magazine and posted it outside his office, with a sticky-note that said, "written by PSU's Beth Hamon for HST 499" -- and circled my photo with a yellow highlight pen.
His graduate assistant Aaron, who'd taken the class with me and had submitted a 50-page paper (on his chosen topic, trade routes throughout the Ottoman Empire) was astonished, and more than a little jealous.
When I asked why he was so shocked, he told me, "Because Percussive Notes is a peer-review journal!" Seeing my confusion, he added, "Undergrads don't get published in peer-review journals!"
To add insult to injury, I had to ask him what a peer-review journal was. I'd never heard the term before.
Aaron didn't know whether to hate me or take me out for a beer. He ultimately chose the latter, and urged me to keep writing.
My father was also very proud (he didn't know what a peer-review journal was, either, since he'd never gone to college). He told me to keep the second copy of the magazine for my files.
I'm glad I did.
In order to get free content from scribd.com I had to buy a membership, or share something I'd written in exchange.
A recent find, these Lido 2B drumsticks date from probably the early 1960s.
Lido was a brand used on drums and sticks made in Japan during the late 1950s/early 1960s. But the catch -- and what makes it harder to research -- is the fact that one Japanese plant manufactured sticks and drums for Lido and a host of other budget-level brands, simply stamping the product with whatever brand was ordered.
For a model 2B the sticks feel rather lightweight, but the grain still suggests some kind of hickory.
There's a lovely patina to them, and only a tiny bit of wood has been worn away from one of the tips. They're decently balanced as a pair, and they play nicely on my vintage Slingerland pad.
They feel more like a large-tipped orchestral stick than a concert band stick.
Eventually, Lido and a few other budget brands from this Japanese plant would be subsumed into the Pearl Drum Company.
As I've explained here before, I have some kind of arthritis, which may or may not be related to also having auto-immune issues. On difficult mornings, my hands are stiff and sore. On better mornings, like today, they're still stiff and my left middle finger still locks up but they don't hurt nearly as much.
So when I have a good hand day, I play whatever I can.
Today it's an old cadence I taught back in the Bronze Age of my pageantry arts teaching career, called El Mondo Groovo (drum cadences aren't generally known for their thoughtful titles). I also tossed in a basic "halt" at the end.
Sticks: Vic Firth, Jeff Queen solo model)
Pad: Vic Firth Slimpad
I've been collecting vintage drum pads for awhile, over a decade. In my efforts to learn as much as I can about them, I've taken it upon myself to research each pad that comes into my humble little collection. Collectors of vintage drums do this too; in fact, there are a number of books published with histories of each major drum company and photos of significant drum models throughout their histories. Books are now available for Ludwig, Slingerland, Gretsch, and many more.
These histories seldom, if ever, offer photos of practice pads. This is largely because Pads hold little interest for a collector who has room to store and display full-sized drums -- and drum kits -- at home.
In fact, I am the only person I know of who has made it a point to focus on pads and, to a lesser extent, vintage sticks.
The primary reason most collectors focus on drums is that they're sexy. Like vintage cars, each make and model from a certain age has its own distinctive markings and style. They look as beautiful as they sound. And if you find one in poor condition, it's a fun challenge to try and restore it, just like a classic car. Parts are out there for the swapping.
A secondary, but no less important reason for the lack of attention given to pads, is that, unlike many drums, they are not date-stamped or utilize a serial number in the manufacture process. Taking it farther, a number of manufacturers had their pads all made by one or two factories, and simply embossed with the appropriate brand name and logo. Practice pads from the 1940s through 70s were a low-profit item, cheap and easy to make and sell, and they were never intended to be sexy. A practice pad was, and is, a simple tool that aids in drummer development.
With one or two factories cranking out cheap practice pads for mutliple companies, it was common to see the exact same photos or illustrations of a pad design in the catalogs of multiple drum companies.
1. Slingerland, circa 1938. Note the design of the bottom three pads in the photo.
2. George Way, circa 1950. Note the design of the top three pads shown here. There is virtually NO difference in design or construction of these pads from those in the Slingerland catalog of 13 years earlier. That's because there was no real change in standard pad designs during these years.
3. Here's another example. Ludwig Drum catalog, circa 1957. Note the standard rubber-on-wood pad designs shown along the top of the page. Now look at the all-rubber Porto-Pad at the far upper left, and the rubber-on-metal design just to the right of it. The "All-Metal" pad is a design that was adapted from one appearing in the 1950 George Way catalog (which had a round rubber pad instead of a square one). The rubber pad is a design first marketed by the WFL Drum Company, which was absorbed into Ludwig during a consolidation in the 1950's.
The upshot of these examples is that, with so many manufacturers offering practice pads of similar (if not identical) size and design, and with the buyout and consolidation of drum companies throughout this "golden" age of rudimental drumming, it's very hard to determine whose design came first. It's even harder to determine the exact age of a vintage pad because along with this reality, there were no serial numbers applied to pads.
The only pads I've been able to approximate an age on are two with unusual identifying characteristics and/or short shelf lives. The first was my Slingerland Radio King practice pad, which dates from the late 1940's. I was able to date this because of the unusual badge design, which was only used on Radio King practice pads for a few years after WWII and went out of production by 1950-51. The other pad is my recently-acquired Timpette, which was easy to date because of its very limited production run in the late 40s -- information which I was able to research on Google Patents.
If you collect drums and have not yet used Google Patents to aid in your historical research, I strongly urge you to check it out. Though it's generally more useful for researching innovations in design rather than researching by model and year, this site has been invaluable as I've researched the age and design of each of my vintage practice pads -- and in two cases, specialty practice sticks.
Other resources which are more helpful for researching model and year include vintage drum catalogs and individual advertisements, school music educator magazines and the occasional peer review journal (such as PASIC's Percussive Notes). Peer review journals for most musical topics can be found with the help of your public library.
You can sometimes find ads in the back pages of specialty publications like Drum Corps World, which may help you to approximate the age and model of marching percussion instruments.
Finally, always check photographs taken during the era in which you think your drum dates from, as close-ups can reveal small but important differences in the design of lugs, snare strainers and more.
As ever, I am always interested in vintage pads and hearing about what you have. Contact me through the CONTACT link at right. Cheers!
I taught this class Sunday evening at the NewCAJE conference, a gathering of Jewish educators from around the country. We made modern-day versions of rattles, shakers and sistrums that were in use in the ancient near east. Then we tried playing them together, to see what kind of music we could make.
It was super-fun, and I love teaching this workshop because everyone is so surprised at how good it all sounds.
A few days ago I took delivery on a homemade quad practice pad.
New, factory-made versions sell for $150 and up. This one cost me a total of $30 including shipping.
All I wanted was something to fart around on, when my snare drumming got stale and/or I felt like switching things up for fun.
(I played a single tenor drum in high school band, and it was nothing like today's multi-tenor outfits.)
So far I've been having a great time with it. I'm going to download some free beginning exercises from the web and see what I can learn on my own.
Will I carry a set of actual tenors one day? Doubtful. A set of quads weighs almost as much as the smallest fiberglass timpani I carried in Drum corps, and I'm not up for damaging my back that way again. But as something to knock about with, this is an interesting and nice addition to my practice pad collection.
This is a recent find, a vintage Pep Pad from the mid 1960s, which I found in the original box.
Pep Drum Products, based in Kankakee IL, produced the pad for what seems to be a limited period of time.
A patent from 1963 is on file, and shows an anticipated expiration date of 1982. There doesn't appear to be any follow-up on file, and the patent permanently expired this year.
The pad is unremarkable in design, though the angle of the tilt seems to be good.
The pad I found came in its original box, which is rare and cool. The box has been repaired with clear packing tape, which I don't mind at all as I'm not fussy about condition issues in my collection.
The pad itself is a solid piece of rubber and is still lively and offers good bounce for its age.
Playing the pad proved easy. There was plenty of rebound, but not so much as to take away some work from my hands -- which is generally how I like my rubber practice pads to feel.
A little video below gives you an idea of how well the pads works for its size and design.
(Apologies for the camera holder obscuring my right hand)
Heading out very early in the morning for my singer-songwriter thing, on tour back east.
I have to pack light since I'm lugging a guitar. So my carryon bag will be just a basic messenger bag, and it has to hold everything that I'll ned to access quickly, including my sheet music, meds, electronics and, well, a pad and sticks.
So I'll be bringing my basic homemade pad with me on this trip.
It's smaller than a full-sized pad, but big enough to sit still on a table top.
And it fits nicely inside my messenger bag with a pair of sticks. See you when I'm back, kids! Happy chopping!
Last weekend, I went up to Seattle for two days with the Unpresidented Brass Band, to join with dozens of other street/DIY cmmunity bands for the Honk! Festival.
It was my introduction to the worldwide Honk! network of bands, and I had a marvelous time.
Friday night. My drum was locked in my friend's trunk so I started things off by playing on a fire hydrant. It sounded interesting and sort of cool, but playing on iron was hard on my hands after awhile.
I was glad to get my drum out eventually.
The entire festival was filled with the sounds of music from over two dozen community bands from throughout the Pacific Northwest, coming from British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and Northern California. The repertoire choices varied greatly, and each ensemble had its own unique visual style. Held up alongside some of the more punk-influenced outfits, were were definitely leaning towards the old fart side of things, but people genuinely enjoy every set we played.
Above: Bass drummers from two different bands had no difficulty agreeing on a beat. Below: A slightly more fleshed-out drum line. Three different grip styles. No judgment.
Below: My favorite band at Honk! - Chaotic Noise Marching Corps, Seattle. Rough, raw and loud, the way a punk marching band ought to be. Drum Corps geeks: note the homemade ISO on the right. It sounds kinda crappy but you definitely hear the snare.
Saturday afternoon, last of three sets we played that day. With the sun going down, things had cooled off enough for me to don my band jacket in the shade, though the shako was still too hot and heavy to wear.
I had a fabulous time and cannot wait for the opportunity to go to another Honk! event.
Thanks to friends of the band, we got a little video while we performed
at the festival. I'm gonna toss these up here and let folks pick and
choose and enjoy.
Friday night. No warm-up, some members got there with about five minutes to spare.
Adrenaline helped:
Saturday afternoon, first set. It was too hot and unshaded for me to wear anything but my band t-shirt.
Still, we survived. And we made people dance and laugh, which means success:
If UBB has an opportunity to go back to Honk! next year I definitely want to go. It's a great celebration of music, community and can-do spirit that can inspire us all in so many positive ways.
Honk! is a worldwide network of bands and festivals and I knew nothing about it until this spring when one of our members suggested we go. I'm very glad she did.
It's early summer, and the beginning of the marching season for so many of us.
Whether you march with an uber-modern DCI corps or your community band, summer is the time to play outside!
And so I've been readying myself and my gear.
1. The heads that came with my Ludwig drum were, along with the snare hardware, pretty beat. The snare-side head had a hole almost as big as my pinky finger. It wasn't too close to the edge of the shell or I would've replaced it sooner. Still, when I noticed a split forming in the batter head -- a CS black dot that was almost as old as the drum -- I decided to bite the bullet and replace both heads.
2. While I was at it, the original strainer mechanism was beginning to fall apart. The tensioning screws for each individual snare had fallen out, and a few snares were missing. The remainder were showing a little surface rust. So after pondering my options, I replaced the entire thing with something simple and more modern (Gibraltar, for all its plainness, sells excellent, serviceable parts that stand up well to daily use). After all, this was never going to be a showpiece. I bought it as a player and the random scratches in the finish never bothered me. I got some trade-in on the parts at Revival, and the new hardware went on fairly easily. I only had to drill new holes for the butt plate.
3. I finally managed to re-shape the steel leg rest I'd scored, so that it would fit my older, larger thigh. (Don't blame that on weight-gain; my quads are a lot bigger now from all that cycling then they were when I was fourteen, and the platform had to be spread a little.)
Early 1970s Ludwig 10 x 14" marching snare, with angle bar and new heads and strainer.
With only eight lugs, there is no point in putting a super-high-tension head on this drum. It was meant to have Mylar heads and that's what it's got. I opted for the Power Stroke, which is what my marching snare drum had my senior year of high school. A tad later than the drum, but it sounds crisp and clean.
Mylar heads are tuned lower, meaning that the player has to do a little of the rebound work themselves. But if you tune the batter head a little high than the snare head, you'll get a crisp, dark sound that those of us of a certain age still know and love.
4. Next up: Sticks. After trying several different makes and models, I
finally took my friend Mary's advice and went with the Vic Firth Jeff
Queen signature model. Although Jeff designed it as a "solo" stick,
honestly it's a fine ensemble stick, especially for smaller hands and
for use on Mylar heads. With my arthritis, it's the stick I've kept
coming back to. So when I pulled out my sticks after my last band
practice and saw the telltale ridge (see photos), I knew it was time to
buy new sticks and wrap them in fresh tape.
The ritual used to go like this: I'd go to the music shop, spend about half an hour finding two sticks of the same model that matched in pitch (in those days I'd settle for 1/4 to 1/2-step apart if I had to); then begging the shop owner for a quantity break on 4 pairs (he almost always said no, unless he'd just smoked a bowl), and then taking them home and setting out the stuff I'd need to wrap each pair in a fresh layer of white electrical tape. In high school, this would be trimmed in thin stripes of royal blue tape at both ends to make the sticks match our school colors. (In corps we didn't bother with trim, because the snare line went through sticks too quickly on tour. I swear, sometimes they'd tape up new show sticks every two to three days.)
This is something of a tiny ritual for me, and taping up new sticks always takes me back to my teen years as a marching member, in a sweet way.
I'm mostly packed for Honk! weekend, and looking forward to a great time playing live in the streets of South Seattle this weekend. I'm playing with the Unpresidented Brass Band. If you read this blog and come to the festival, find our band and say hello.
Above: a little vid. I'm just farting around, playing whatever I feel like. Sometimes it's nice not to have a plan. Cheers!
When I was in college in the early 1980s, I came across a large lot of used drum and percussion parts, sticks and accessories at the downtown location of Captain Whizeagles, the music store where I'd bought my drumsticks since 6th grade. Whizeagles was closing its downtown location and moving out to somewhere in Clackamas, Oregon, far beyond the reach of public transit at the time. So I rushed to the shop to see if there would be any blowouts before it closed.
I found a pair of Hinger Touch-Tone snare drum sticks, size large for marching and rudimental use.
Made of hollow aluminum shafts, each stick also had small rubber sleeves which could be moved up and down along the sticks to change the balance and sound. I remember paying very little for the sticks -- they were useless for rock and roll playing -- and showed them to my drum instructor back on campus. He offered me many times what I'd paid for them, and since I was a broke college student who needed the money, I sold them.
Later on, of course, I wished I hadn't sold them. They were different and very cool.
So when I found another pair in the medium (concert) size at Revival Drum Shop, I had to have them. Fortunately, I had some trade on account and used that to purchase these.
The sticks themselves are nothing special to look at, other than the material. They're basically hollow aluminum rods with holes at each end, about the same length as a regular wooden drumstick.
These sticks did not have any rubber on them; I'd seen them with and without rubber weights, and I've even seen a pair with rubber handles at one end. (Fred Hinger, the designer of the sticks, meant for them to be played with matched grip.)
If I really want to experiment, I suppose I could find some super-skinny bicycle inner tubes and cut a few small sections off to approximate the same function.
Still, with or without weights, these things play an orchestral buzz roll that is so clean and beautiful it sounds like tissue paper being gently torn.
A bit about Fred Hinger the innovator, and his son Bill who took over the business and made further innovations, borrowed from the Olympic Drums web site:
*********
Through his entire career Fred Hinger was never satisfied with
commercially produced percussion products and spent much time creating
his own drumsticks and tympani mallets while he was in the Philadelphia
Orchestra. He found that tympani handles made of bamboo produced a much
larger sound than the traditional wood handles found on virtually all
commercially produced tympani mallets. People started asking him to make
the same mallets for them, and as time went on he started selling these
hand sewn tympani mallets to students and other professionals.
In the early 1960’s, he began to experiment with other handle materials
and found that an aluminum tubular handle would produce the same sound
characteristics of the bamboo, but were much more consistent and could
be duplicated much more easily. As business
picked up in the early 1960’s he registered the trademarks Hinger and
Touch-Tone, which eventually became the company name. When Bill Hinger (Fred's son) joined the United States Army Band in Washington,
D.C. in 1967, all tympani mallet production was moved to Alexandria,
Virginia. Bill became responsible for production of tympani mallets for
the next three years. Fred focused on designing and building a concert snare drum from a solid metal shell that sounded incredibly crisp and clean. [Note: I had the pleasure of playing some college band concerts on my instructor's Hinger snare drum. It was a thing of beauty and one of the most incredible instruments I'd ever played.] In 1969 Bill Hinger broached the idea of starting a company to make
sticks, snare drums and tympani. In May 1970, Bill left the Army Band
and moved back to New Jersey. From that point forward, Bill was responsible for the design and
production of all innovations and ideas generated by himself and his
dad.
********
Fred Hinger sold the mallet side of his business and closed down the snare drum production side completely in the late 1980s. He died in 2001. Hinger snare drums remain highly sought after both as incredible instruments and as vintage collectibles.
Malletech now distributes Hinger products, including timpani and marimba mallets and the concert sized aluminum and maple snare drum sticks. They also offer a slider kit that may fit my concert sticks, but more research is needed before I buy a set.
Hinger sticks by Malletech are available from a few outlets, including Steve Weiss and Mostly Marimba.
Here's the maple version of the Hinger snare drum stick, available from Steve Weiss; maybe down the road I'll spring for a pair. Even though it's basically the same shape as the aluminum version, being made of wood you could get away with an errant rim shot here or there. Even so, these are not sticks I'd want to use for anything other than concert playing.
I'm going to hang out with these on my concert snare drum over the next few weeks and see whether or not I want to bother with making or buying sliders.
Back when I marched in my high school band, the stick of choice for the snares was a traditional, heavy 3S stick with a medium taper and an acorn-shaped tip. Fat as my father's thumb, and seventeen inches long. Usually pretty heavy -- too heavy for my still-growing hands, which is why I used 2B's until my senior year.
Promark came out with sticks made in either American hickory or Japanese oak. The hickory sticks were predictably comfortable -- they had a "spring" and "flex" to them, and absorbed the shock of accented notes so your hands wouldn't have to take the full impact. Hickory remains the first choice for drummers today for that reason.
Oak was another matter. Oak sticks were noticeably heavier, and harder. They were harder to break unless you played like Sesame Street's Animal. My section leader, a handsome boy who came from one of the wealthiest families in town, could buy any sticks he wanted, and he did, trying out various brands and models to find the sticks that worked for him. He tried the Promark 3S in both oak and hickory, ultimately opting for the hickory for its ease on the hands. The hickory also cost less than the oak model, so you could buy many more pairs and always have spares on hand.
Today, a pair of Promark 3S sticks in oak arrived, from a fellow vintage drum enthusiast who didn't need them and offered them to me. (He knows I try to find stuff from my early years of drumming, mid to late 1970s.)
I cleaned off the masking tape with some nail polish remover, and tried them out on my rubber pad.
They felt lighter than I remembered, perhaps because my hands are full-size now (and far stronger than when I was fifteen). They felt well-balanced and surprisingly not all that heavy. A longer session with them might prove me wrong later on.
They're beautiful sticks. The oak grain is luminous and almost shines in places. The gold stripe at the ends is accompanied by the numeral "79" (year of manufacture, perhaps?) and the words "Hand-made in Japan" -- and they don't appear to have been used all that much.
These will enjoy a slot in the stick display, and I may play with them from time to time (on a pad only, though). What old sticks do you like to play with now and then, for nostalgia's sake or just for a change of pace?
I do this every day, several times a day, in my head. I try to do it in the mornings on my practice pad.
I did not acquire a real drum of my own until I was fourteen. Before that, I played everything at home on a practice pad, and the sound and feel of pads has stayed with me one of my great sonic loves.
It's a big part of why I collect pads instead of actual drums. There's just something about the thwack! of sticks on a rubber pad that tweaks the pleasure center in my brain, and once that jones has been established it's not going away.
So when I want to figure out a groove, I do it on my pad.
Today's groove, which may become the foundation for a new composition: Padded Love.
1940s Slingerland Radio King Pad, 1970s Ludwig 2S sticks.
(I don't play on this pad with modern marching sticks as they're too big and fat for such an old pad.)
Blogger will only let me post up to 100mb of video so this is a cut from the original. But you get the idea.
I'm imagining laying down a "bass" part with a 5-galon water jug, and perhaps some metallic colors with some old hub caps and a homemade sistrum. Stay tuned.
When I was having health issues over this past winter, my counselor suggested I look at a meditative practice to help ease some of my symptoms and create a consistent way to begin my day.
I tried sitting still for five minutes, every morning.
That seemed doable. So I upped it to ten.
It got harder, but I hung in there.
I thought about upping it to fifteen, but my last day at ten minutes crashed and burned at around Minute Six. I was fidgeting and squirming and I couldn't sit still anymore.
So I gave up.
One morning after my failure, I was in the studio, fiddling with my sticks and a rubber practice pad (definitely a happy place). I pulled up my dog-eared copy of Stick Control and opened it to the first page.
I set up my metronome at something stupid slow like 70 beats per minute, and forced myself to play the entire first page as instructed: each exercise twenty times without break before moving onto the next one.
So the whole point of Stick Control is that it's meant to be sequential, methodical and very gradual. You don't jump from Page One to Page Ten. (You could, but you won't really benefit as much from just burning through and sight-reading. This is not a sight-reading book.)
By the time I'd gotten through the entire first page at that speed, I noticed two things:
a. My hands felt jerky and klunky at the beginning, and pretty smooth and comfortable by the end of the page.
b. Repeating every figure twenty times before moving on at 70 bpm took me something like 10 whole minutes.
I knew I was onto something.
Every morning after that, after eating breakfast and taking my meds, I went into the studio and played the first page of Stick Control, at gradually increasing tempi with the help of a metronome.
When I was done with that, I decided I wanted to play something else. So I pulled up book number two: 128 Rudimental Street Beats, a collection of drum cadence figures from the 1960s, by John S. Pratt (a master drummer of the time and the head drum instructor at West Point).
These beats are deceptively simple.
I figured that, if I could nail down the snare drum part, I could then get the bass drum and cymbals in my little community band to play steady time, with beats on the quarter-notes. (None of them are experienced drummers and a couple don't read music at all, so I have to introduce new material by ear and repetition.)
What I discovered along the way of selecting two or three street beats I could string together is that these things are actually a lot of fun to play. I memorized a couple and have incorporated them into my morning drumitation.
Finally, if there was time left in my half-hour time limit, I'd pull out
my favorite solo book of all: America's NARD Drum Solos, published in the
1940s and reprinted with fresh plates about 20 years ago.
The NARD Book was compiled by the first members of a new drumming organization formed in 1936, called the National Association of Rudimental Drummers. Their goal was to standardize the 26 basic rudiments (the "drummer's scales") known at the time and to encourage new drummers to adopt these standard rudiments as part of their training.
The original organization lasted until it disbanded in the late 1970s. A new version of NARD was established in 2008 and remains active today. This book, now in its third edition, remains a gold standard for rudimental drummers around the world, and it's the book I learned from in high school. (I still have my old copy!)
I don't always work out of this book every morning -- sometimes I get lost in Stick Control and allow myself to just zone out, because the point of drumitation is to chill out and calm down, not to work up new material all the time. But when I reach for it there's always something more for me to learn.
I learned a couple of these solos for contest in school. Because I couldn't afford private lessons I figured them out myself, and was scolded for taking this approach at contest. "You're a good drummer," the judge told me. "If you're serious about your drumming you'll make finding a private teacher a priority." (This was back in the good old days when it was unseemly to admit that your Dad was looking for work and you were eating tuna casserole for the fourth night that week. So I kept my mouth shut and nodded. Then I went home I continued to play and work out stuff myself. I did not have a private drum teacher on a regular basis until I got to college.)
In my return to rudimental drumming I find that I'm sometimes paying for my lack of private instruction early on. But since my primary goal is to enjoy myself and to use rudimental drumming as part of a meditative practice, I don't worry about that. I'm not currently looking for a private teacher (and I can't afford one, anyway). And sometimes I don't get to the drum pad when I'd planned to so I end up doing it a little later in the day. But drumming on a rubber pad has definitely helped me musically and emotionally, and for that reason I'm grateful I can still play.
I joined my school band in 1973, when I was ten years old. We had moved to Concord, California about three months after I started fifth grade, and I wanted to join the band and learn an instrument.
My first choices -- trumpet and french horn -- were not available. My parents told me they couldn't afford to rent something from a store, so I had to make do with whatever I could borrow from the school. After considering multiple options, I chose the drums, and rode home with a brand new pair of 5-A sticks and a Remo tuneable practice pad in my backpack.
The Remo pad was the first practice pad for a whole generation of drummers, most of whom began playing in the late 1960s through early 1980s. It's portability and tuneability were the main selling factors, as was the reasonable price. Because the school bought pads and sticks in quantity, I could obtain my pad and sticks for a total of $10 in 1973 ($45-50 today, adjusting for inflation).
The Remo pad was also popular because it could be played on a tabletop (or on a tilted music stand, which was standard practice when I was a kid) or mounted on a threaded cymbal stand; the raised rim allowed you to experiment with something cool called a "rim shot" (played on a real drum, this would eventually break the stick; played on the Remo pad, this would eventually crack the plastic rim. I admit I broke at least four Remo pad rims on my way to High School, when I switched to a rubber practice pad). Another nice feature was the replaceable head -- though I never played mine hard enough to have to replace one. The largest size, 10" in diameter, was almost big enough to practice brushes on.
The pad, first patented in 1962 (only a year before I was born!), revolutionized drum practice for tens of thousands of school and professional drummers for decades, and nearly every drummer my age remembers starting out on one of these pads.
(Below: A 1966 patent for Remo's practice drum kit, comprised of multiple tuneable pads on an adjustable metal frame. Today, you can find these for amazingly little money at yard sales and on craigslist.)
Remo tuneable pads are now considered a good choice for a student on a tight budget, the idea being that when money was available the goal would be to "upgrade" to something "better" -- or, in 2019, something that came closer to the feel of a high-tension marching snare with a Kevlar head. Remo pad heads are tuneable, but not past a certain point; and that point doesn't come close to the feel of a higher-tension head.
For those who can't afford a high-tension, "modern" practice pad (the best ones start at close to $100 each), there are numerous Youtube videos showing how to get an approximation of the modern "fake-snare" sound by modifying the Remo pad -- by filling it to the brim with unpopped popcorn or even ball bearings, and even swapping in longer bolts to allow for tighter tuning. But remember, that plastic rim can only handle so much tension -- so if you decide to experiment this way, expect that the rim will show its limits before you reach the desired higher tension.
For those of us who continue to play on Mylar heads, the original, unmodified Remo pad is still a fine choice, which is why I keep one in my stable today. Happy playing!
I came of drumming age, as it were, in the days when marching drums came with Mylar heads, same as concert drums.
Around the time I had graduated high school, some drum lines were experimenting with a head made of woven Kevlar (the same stuff found in bulletproof vests). Kevlar was the new miracle material; drums heads made from it could be tuned higher and tighter than any Mylar head. As a result, kids in the 1980s began putting Kevlar heads on their regular drums, cranking down the lug bolts, and playing hard enough to break lugs and drum shells.
Of course, this led to the development of high-tension drums, with a free-floating shell and a tubular lug that could withstand the forces of cranked-down Kevlar heads. Eventually it even led to drum tuning wrenches that could handle the torque required to tune a high-tension drum. (I have one of these and I only use it on the aforementioned drums. It's complete overkill for anything else.)
The result changed marching percussion forever. Modern drum corps and marching bands now use Kevlar or Kevlar-Carbon hybrid heads almost exclusively. Today's kids are learning to play on these heads from middle school onward, with the result that it's ruining their concert technique (because we still use Mylar heads in orchestral playing and they require a very different touch) and it's ruining their hands and wrists in the long run (because the tension is so high there's no real "give" and all the shock goes into the hands and wrists, causing fatigue and a high potential for tendon and joint injury in younger players).
I had just missed the Kevlar boat when my marching days ended; The one season I marched in college band the school was broke and still had older drums with Mylar heads. When I began coaching high school drum lines, nearly every one was equipped with high-tension drums and Kevlar heads. I had to adjust my playing approach, and my hands became fatigued early on. Eventually, I learned to play examples on a pad and let the snare players figure out on their drums. (I didn't yet know that high-tension drums could cause long-term issues; I just figured it was because I wasn't used to it.)
When I joined the UBB last year, I scored a used Dynasty Wedge snare and carrier to march with. The drum's sound was tight and crisp -- and completely out of p[lace for the second-line style of playing I was being asked to do. But it weighed far less than a regular high-tension drum, so I hung with it until I came across this Ludwig marching snare drum from the 1970s, around the time I played in high school band. After some fussing and cleaning and little help from the fellas at Revival Drum Shop, The drum has become a serious player. And I love it so much I've put my Wedge drum up for sale.
You'll notice that, with Mylar heads, you really have to draw the sound out of the drum more; you can't just let the sticks bounce happily away, because Mylar heads will require you to do a little of the work, controlling the strokes with your hands and wrists. (This i why, back when I marched, we practiced at night on our pillows before going to sleep in the gym on tour. The pillow made us do ALL the work, and we built up our chops as a result. Today, I'm sure wouldn't be able to pull of half of what I'm doing with my arthritic hands, if I had not worked out this way as a kid.)
You'll also notice a fuller, deeper sound with a lot more space in it. That's because of both the shape of the drum and the lower tension required for Mylar heads, both of which lend more depth and color to the snare drum's sound. (My drum is a 14" x 10" model -- try this in a 15" or 16" snare drum from the 50's and you'll be amazed at the depth and darkness of the tone.)
Because you know what the other benefit of going back is? With a sling and leg rest, this drum weighs far less than my high-tension setup, and my whole body is happier.
Sometimes going retro is the right thing to do. I'll never play Kevlar heads again. Because I don't need to.
I wish I had more photographic evidence of my time spent devoted to drumming.
But all I have are these photos. Hopefully, they tell most of the story.
1. 1973: Why I chose drumming.
(Above: Karen and David Carpenter, 1969. Check that traditional grip.)
I'd already been playing beats on anything I could find. When I was seven, my best friend owned two Hoppity Hops (remember those?) and when we'd watch The Partridge Family at her house, I'd turn them into my drum kit while she grabbed a giant Magic Marker and made it a microphone. The year I turned nine we moved to California. My Dad bought me a cheap set of bongos at the souvenir booth at Frontier Village, a third-tier theme park in San Jose. I played along with records and the radio until the heads broke. Then my Mom patched them up with duct tape and I played them some more.
In the summer of 1973, we moved from Walnut Creek to Concord, California. In fifth grade I was old enough to take a music class at the new school. My parents, both trained singers, hoped I'd sign up for choir. Being terrified of singing solo in front of people, I chose instrumental music.
The teacher, a fine cellist in the local community orchestra, invited me to consider taking up the cello. I loved the sound, but it wouldn't fit in my bicycle basket and we only had one car. So I asked for something more portable. I was given the option of violin (nope), clarinet (definitely not) and drums, which at the time required me to own only a practice pad and sticks.
I was warned I'd be the only girl in the drum section, but that didn't bother me since I was already the only girl interested in lots of "boy" things (like skateboarding and BMX).
I suddenly remembered that Karen Carpenter played drums and she was awesome.
That last reason pretty much decided it for me.
2. Gresham High School, Homecoming parade, fall 1977.
I moved with my family to Gresham, Oregon in 1975. After living in or very close to much larger cities, I thought Portland (and by extension, Gresham to the east) was a hick town with provincial, almost tribal loyalties that made little room for new kids like me. Still, once we landed in Oregon we weren't moving again, so I made the best of it.
In my freshman year of high school, I joined the marching band and played a traditional single tenor drum. (I'm marching in front of the guy with the light blue saxophone strap, my face partly obscured by the saxophonist marching in front of me.) If it rained, we marched. If it blew hard from the east, we marched. A parent would bring hot baked potatoes to the drumline at every home football game so we could stuff them inside our sleeves to keep our hands warm. After we played at halftime, we'd eat them, still warm, while the infamous East Wind would come screaming out of the Columbia Gorge and almost rip my face off.
I loved those old-school uniforms; the white wool overlay could be removed to reveal a tuxedo jacket underneath which was worn for concert band. (Women wore blue vests and skirts and white blouses, all of which had to be sewn from an approved pattern. I sold my vest and skirt back to the school when I graduated.) And those spats! So cool.
Sadly, these uniforms were replaced the following year by ugly, "modern" zip-up jackets, black pants and new shakos that were glittery and over the top.
Today, my alma mater's band program has NO real uniforms. Concert attire is black pants or skirt and a white dress shirt; and the marching band plays in sweatshirts and jeans.
..::sigh::..
(Vintage content: We played Ludwig drums that dated from the 1960s. Today my tenor drum would be a collector's item, selling on eBay for upwards of $100 in good condition. In my senior year, I could choose to play snare drum, or the brand-new marching Roto-Toms that we ordered to approximate "corps-style" drum lines. I chose the Roto-Toms and had a blast. I recently acquired NOS tenor mallets with wooden heads, exactly like the ones I used in that final year, still in the packaging. I may actually play with them at some point.)
Later that summer, I marched for three months with the Spartans Drum & Bugle Corps of Vancouver, WA. Two months of rehearsals in the spring, followed by First Tour, a three-week barnstorming tour through the Pacific Northwest. Drum Corps was really hard on me physically, for reasons which would only become clear in adulthood; but I still loved it and was looking forward to going on the national Second Tour, which would culminate in a performance at the DCI World Championships.
It all ended when my mother met the bus at the corps hall on the last day of first tour, bundled me into our car, and on the way home told me I wouldn't be marching with the corps anymore. My father had lost his job -- a nightclub he'd been playing piano bar in for almost a year suddenly closed on him without warning. The next night they re-opened with a DJ; it was the height of the disco era and lots of clubs found it cheaper to hire a DJ than to pay a live band. When he complained to his union local, they told him he was on his own. My dad tore up his union card at that meeting and was immediately blacklisted.
I had to find work -- mowing lawns, babysitting, delivering the paper, or whatever else a fifteen-year-old could do for money. I spent some of my free time scavenging garbage bins and back alleys for pop and beer bottles; thanks to Oregon's landmark Bottle Bill, I could take the empties back for change, and that was my allowance each week. With the money from my part-time "regular" jobs, I helped my parents pay the utility bills all summer. (My sister was old enough to work as a waitress, and she was outgoing and really pretty so she got a lot of tips.)
We ate a lot of tuna casserole and my Dad didn't find steady work again for several months. I never marched in corps again, a regret that lingers today.
(Below: rumor has it I'm somewhere in this photo, though I barely remember the parade. We marched a LOT of parades during First Tour. I'll assume this was late in that tour, after I was switched from timps to bells, which would put me in front of the timps and out of photo range.)
3. Western Oregon State College, 1983.
I'm playing with our college stage band at the Oregon Collegiate Jazz
Festival, somewhere in Salem if memory serves. We weren't half bad. Our
kit drummer was a great player (though like most twenty-year-old guys
he was a little full of himself).
Our brass section was to die for. I
played Latin percussion and occasionally vibes. That is my old HS
concert blouse, the only dressy white shirt I owned at the time, with
black slacks and a vest I scored at Goodwill.
(Vintage content: Those congas are vintage Gon-Bops from the 60s. They were a thing of beauty and a joy to play. I really hope they're still being played somewhere.)
In the late 1980s I played with a band called Pure Imagination, a vocal quartet backed by a combo. We did charts made famous by the Four Freshman, the Modernaires, Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, and the Swingle Singers -- all the vocal jazz groups whose music I'd been weaned on in school. At the time I was also making money playing in pit orchestras for musicals and operettas (please don't ask me how I feel about Gilbert & Sullivan. Thank you.), and had a beautiful Ludwig four-piece Ringo Starr model kit with white marine pearl finish. I was so stoked to buy this kit that I held a "christening" party for it in my tiny apartment, and invited the cast and crew of the show I was playing in to celebrate with me. To my great surprise, a lot of them did.
Sadly, there are no pictures of me with that kit. In 1997, my right hand was seriously injured in a bicycle-car collision. After two surgeries and a year of PT, I was told that my playing would likely never be the same. So I sold most of my percussion instruments, including that kit.
This was the beginning of a ten-year break from playing drums and percussion, and the beginning of my career as a singer-songwriter.
4. Northwest Folklife Festival, Seattle, 2010, with Jack Falk.
Along with rudimental drumming, I'd learned to accompany singers -- my parents first, and then school jazz choirs -- on brushes. I loved playing brushes for singers because it taught me how to phrase and breathe with them. I maintain that singing, and working with singers, made me a better drummer.
In the early 2000's, I got married, bought a house, and longed to play drums again. So I started with just a snare drum and brushes, and practiced rudiments on a little Remo practice pad like the one from my childhood. Eventually, friends got wind of my return to drumming and invited me to sit in with them now and then. Jack Falk, a good friend of ours, had retired from his European touring to return to school and finish a Masters degree, and invited me to play out with him now and then.
Here, I'm playing for the amazing klezmer artist Jack Falk at Northwest Folklife, one of the largest and oldest folk festivals in the USA. I went up to Seattle in a Prius packed with luggage and other instruments -- I was also playing a solo set on the songwriter's stage -- so I could only bring a snare and hi-hat. Jack assured me that would be enough, and it was. In fact, he was so thrilled with how it came out that he asked me to stay onstage and play for a set by UW's student klezmer band, the Disciples of Goldenshteyn. It was a gloriously fat, messy set filled with laughing trombones and crying clarinets, and I had a helluva good time.
4. Kit drumming, 2010-12.
When I began to play again I assembled a drum kit from spare parts, obtained mostly at thrift shops, online and yard sales. The kit included a sweet vintage Royce snare drum that, for having only six lugs, sounded amazing. I converted a floor tom into a really small kick drum and rebuilt it with wooden hoops and bass drum heads. The idea was to use it to accompany soloists and small ensembles, so I never bothered to get a rack tom for it. By this time, though, didn't really have anywhere to play it, and because I was still working full-time as a bike mechanic I didn't have time to pursue it. I eventually sold the kit to a friend for twice what it had cost me to cobble it together.
5. Shalshelet Jewish Music Festival, 2013, Miami.
In all the time I'd stopped drumming with sticks, I was still making sounds on anything I could get my hands on, including doumbek, tar (African frame drum), maracas, and tambourines.
In 2013, one of my compositions was accepted for inclusion at a Jewish music festival taking place in Miami. At the same time, I was also forging ahead with a full-time Jewish music career, having left the bike shop for good in 2012. I played a fundraiser show to cover my airfare, and went down to Miami, where it was immediately clear that I was a Jewish singer-songwriter who could also drum. I made myself available to other festival artists and wound up spending a fair amount of time onstage at the gala concert.
I continued to tour as a Jewish artist and educator-in-residence, and added percussion to my educational kit, accompanying multiple artists and even ending up on a couple of their recordings.
Today, I am as often found behind a drum as I am singing out front at Jewish festivals and music conferences.
6. Tziona Achishena, Portland concert 2018.
Jack Falk called me last August. "The Sephardic shul [synagogue] is hosting an Israeli artist, she's awesome and needs a drummer. However, because it's an orthodox shul, no men are allowed at the concert [The orthodox have a rule about men not hearing womens' voices in public spaces]. You're the only woman drummer I know who could learn her tunes quickly enough. The concert's in two days and she says she'll pay a hundred and fifty bucks. Want the gig?"
I brought my percussive love to an audience of mostly orthodox Jewish women from around the Portland area, accompanying a talented and gracious artist named Tziona Achishena. It was a whirlwind evening, I hung on for dear life to the charts, Tziona was a brilliant singer and composer, the whole roomful of women and girls got up and danced through the aisles, and everyone had a joyous time. (Video, below: I'm accompanying Tziona on a five-gallon water bottle with an amazing sound.)
7. Today. Still at it.
I'm playing drums every morning, chopping out on a practice pad as part of my meditative practice and a way to help manage the depression I was diagnosed with five years ago.
Along the way, I've re-discovered the joy of rudimental drumming for its own sake, joined a community band and am slowly working my way to true drum happiness.
I make and sell little travel cajons from recycled wooden cigar boxes and repurposed snare hardware.
I've joined a couple of online forums dedicated to rudimental drumming and vintage drums, and I feel like I've reconnected with a piece of my childhood that was especially happy and today is a source of comfort and joy.
Even though it's basically the same shape as the aluminum version, being made of wood you could get away with an errant rim shot here or there. Even so, these are not sticks I'd want to use for anything other than concert playing.
